This article argues that institutional AI policy functions as de facto language policy when it regulates how language is used, taught, and assessed, making AI policy literacy an essential professional capacity for the language education sector. As AI governance increasingly shapes the practices and future of language education, educators need to move beyond interpreting and complying with institutional policies to critically examining how these policies are framed, enacted, governed, and revised, and actively participating in their development. Yet institutional AI policymaking has been predominantly framed through technical, ethical, and academic integrity concerns, leaving language expertise underrepresented and the sector’s policy capacity largely unexamined. Drawing on an expert panel of senior language education leaders, this article develops a conceptual framework of AI policy literacy comprising six interconnected dimensions: textual, discursive, enactment, governance, equity, and adaptive literacies. It argues that language educators have a legitimate claim to professional jurisdiction in AI governance, but that exercising this jurisdiction requires deliberate and systematic policy capacity-building. Rather than positioning language educators merely as stakeholders affected by institutional decisions, the framework provides a foundation for their informed participation and leadership in AI policymaking. By conceptualising AI policy literacy as both a professional repertoire and a means of strengthening sectoral agency, the article positions AI policy research as an emerging area of inquiry that brings language expertise into institutional AI governance. Its implications extend beyond language education to other disciplinary and professional communities seeking greater agency in shaping the policies that govern their practices.
University websites are important digital spaces where multilingual resources are organized. Focusing on China’s Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area, a context characterized by distinct language-policy and institutional environments, this study explores how university websites manage multilingual visibility and (non-) translation. Drawing on an institutional language governance framework and the political economy of language, we analyzed 1,800 webpages from twelve leading universities across Guangdong, Hong Kong and Macao. The analysis reveals two recurring patterns: emblematic juxtaposition at the interface level and selective (non-)translation across language versions. Clear regional variations emerge: universities in Hong Kong and Macao prioritize English and Traditional Chinese, while Guangdong universities primarily use Simplified Chinese, with limited English translations in certain content areas. These asymmetries indicate a stratified digital multilingualism, where multilingual resources are organized in different and uneven ways. This stratification is revealed through dimensions of representation, function, access, and legitimacy. Instead of simply reflecting formal policies, these asymmetries shape differential access to institutional content across audiences. The article argues that selective (non-) translation functions as a mechanism of institutional language governance and shows how multilingual resources are organized through digital infrastructures.
English Medium Instruction (EMI) is often justified through promises of future employability, socioeconomic mobility, and international educational opportunity. Such promises invite learners and institutions to invest in imagined futures through hope, aspiration, anxiety, fear, and urgency. This conceptual article argues that temporality and affect are central to understanding EMI as an ideological and political project. Drawing on the sociology of time, theories of anticipation, and critical affect studies, I develop a temporal-affective lens that reorients the five facets of Critical EMI identified by Mirhosseini and De Costa (2025): ideology, policy, identity, social justice, and the politics of English. Temporality and affect are conceptualized not as additional facets but as mutually constitutive mechanisms through which particular futures become imaginable, desirable, and actionable in the present. Bangladesh’s National Education Policy 2010 and related scholarship are used to illustrate how English is positioned between histories of colonialism and linguistic nationalism and contemporary aspirations for mobility, economic advancement, and global participation. The article proposes critical anticipation as an analytical orientation for examining which futures EMI constructs, what emotions sustain them, what present actions they demand, who is positioned to pursue them, and which alternative futures are obscured.
In order to examine the disjuncture in responses to the Indigenous Languages Act (ILA) between different Indigenous groups, in this paper I will explore the genealogy of Indigenous language policy in Canada by examining various government and community reports, documents, as well as parliamentary and committee debates from the 1960s onwards, which is when Canada’s first official language policy was announced. I argue that the continued state prioritization of official white settler languages means that even for a region like Inuit Nunangat with relatively good linguistic vitality through decades long efforts by the Inuit to prioritize Inuktut, the development of an Indigenous languages act cannot guarantee the future reclamation and ongoing vitality of Indigenous languages in Canada.
By adopting a critical, ethnographically informed approach to standardization from above within historical sociolinguistics, this study examines the tensions and material constraints that shaped implementation processes in Chilean primary education between 1852 and 1862. We analyze 83 school inspection reports authored by eleven inspectors appointed by the Chilean Ministry of Education, whose main role was to monitor the quality of primary schooling nationwide. We argue that these reports offer valuable bottom-up insights into how teachers and local communities, including Indigenous groups, interpreted and engaged with the standard language ideologies being implemented in primary education. The results show that implementation was a complex and dynamic process marked by negotiation, conflict and resistance. Families’ and the Mapuche people’s conceptions and values assigned to literacy often diverged from the official gaze articulated by school inspectors. Moreover, the process was also tensioned by the lack of adequate teacher training and school supplies, which imposed limitations but also opened spaces for negotiation. Building on these findings, we call for a more critical and nuanced approach to standardization from above in historical sociolinguistics, drawing on Language Policy and Planning and the glottopolitical perspective to foreground language ideologies, agency and power in historical implementation processes.
